Bitter Harvest: A Woman's Fury, a Mother's Sacrifice (17 page)

Mott could only hope that the cop’s information was correct, and that the two people trapped inside were in that basement bedroom. At the front of the house, flames were shooting out the windows above the door and showing through at least half of the roof. When Mott reached the south side, he could see the back of the house. “I saw fire from the gutter line to the ridge…. I saw fire blowing out of the back [east side] of the house and extending to a wood deck on the back of this house and a railing. That was on fire from the fire blowing out.”

It would be too late for anyone trapped upstairs in the north end of the house. Mott could not make his way across the backyard at all, even though the swimming pool was there. The billowing flames and intense heat barred his way. “I radioed ‘Command’ and advised him I had fifty percent involvement,” Mott said.

Every other firefighter on the scene was busy with his own assignment. Mott commandeered the police officer to follow him to the ladder truck to get a ladder and an ax. They ran to the south side of the house. It was the only hope: Mott didn’t see any fire through the windows at the south end. He climbed the ladder to a second-floor window and used the ladder to break it. Wearing an air tank, he leaned the top half of his body into the room, which he now saw was a bathroom. He could just make out the outline of a tub.

Three times, he yelled,
“Fire Department!”

“I got no response,” he said. “I left the ladder at that window and came down to this window [at ground level at the southeast corner] and broke it out with my ax.” And again, he leaned his upper body into the room beyond. He could see perhaps two feet into the room; everything beyond was obscured by smoke. Again, he called out. Again, there was no answer.

The two men broke the southwest window and Mott grabbed handfuls of the vertical blinds hanging there, pulling them loose, tossing them out on the lawn. He noted that though they had burned spots they weren’t smoking.

Mott could not go in alone: firefighters must work in pairs, for their own safety. He ran to the command post and signaled a newly arrived crew to come with him. He and the three men who followed him had their turnout gear: helmets, coats, gloves, boots, air packs—everything possible to protect them against the raging fire.

Mott broke the group into two-man teams. “I directed the two other firefighters to go into the [main floor] window. I told them not to go too far because of the overhead fire.” Then he asked the remaining firefighter, Wayne Harder, to help him search the ground level. Harder was from another department. Mott had never seen him before; he might never see him again. Good firefighters are trained so well in the basic rules of rescue and survival that they know what to do. For these tense minutes, Mott and Harder would be responsible for each other’s lives as they felt their way through rooms whose ceilings might drop on them at any moment.

They entered through the window where the blinds had been and dropped to the floor to crawl on their hands and knees. “We search by feel … through years of training,” Mott explained. “We listen to fire crackling and we feel our way around the house…. To keep our bearings, we search to the right—so no matter how many rooms we have—closets, bathrooms, kitchens—if we continue to go to the right, eventually we’ll end up back at the place where we made entry.”

Mott and Harder could do nothing about the blaze itself: they had no firefighting equipment. They were hoping to save lives. In each room, they looked in closets, under beds, under tables. They moved through what was obviously a bedroom, sweeping the floor with their arms spread wide. They found no one. They were trying to buy time, and it was too awkward to crawl. They risked getting up off their hands and knees and walked in a bent-over shuffle.

The next room was a recreation room. Again, they found no one. They moved on to a hallway and came to a closed door. Mott opened it—to find a wall of fire. “I could see through the floor joists to the first floor of the residence,” Mott said. There was nothing they could do here, with the fire blazing above all the way to the roof. Mott closed the door.

In what was obviously a playroom, they found only piles of toys and dress-up clothes. They entered a room with a pool table, but they didn’t stay long. The ceiling fell in on them. Sheetrock, insulation, and boards let go and knocked Mott and Harder to their knees. Their time to find someone alive had run out. Their time to stay alive themselves was about to do the same.

After committing what he had seen inside to memory, Mott knew that they could be the next victims if they didn’t get out of there. “We had done our jobs.” In the dark, working to the right, they found the room where they had entered the house. Outside, they rejoined the other pair, who had worked their way in past the bathroom one floor up. They had not found anyone either.

Next the four men searched the garage. There was one car visible there and they still had faint hopes of finding the children—even one child—alive. But there was no one in the car or under it.

One of the assisting fire companies had set up a monitor hose in the neighbors’ yard and water cascaded over the burning house. The firefighters had almost accepted the fact that the two children in the house were beyond saving, but Mott didn’t want to give up. There was a walkway entry to the house from the garage that ended with two steps up to a locked door. When Mott and his men kicked the lock open, the door felt “spongy.”

But there was nothing on the other side but “fall-down”—material from an upper floor that had dropped when the ceiling burned through. As much as Mott and his men wanted to get in the house, it was not possible through this route. Sheetrock, light fixtures, insulation—all had tumbled down and kept them from opening the door.

It was obvious now that the northern part of the house, particularly the upper portion, had suffered the most destruction. The firefighters feared the missing children might be up there. That was the children’s wing, according to officers who had been called to the house before, and if that was true, any hope the firefighters had of saving the two missing children was futile by the time they arrived on the scene.

The fire was “tapped”—put out—at about 1:45 A.M., although the firefighters would remain on the scene all night.

No one knew yet what had caused this disaster, but the house had gone up so rapidly that arson had to be considered. Detectives Gary Baker and Trish Campbell of the Prairie Village police were called at their homes and told to come directly to the fire scene. Detective Sergeant Greg Burnetta and Detective Rod Smith were asked to report to the Prairie Village police station and stand by to question witnesses.

At what had been a lovely home at 7517 Canterbury Court, police and firefighters continued their work as the heedless wind blew. It would be hours before the ruined house cooled enough for them to go in and look for the bodies of Tim and Kelly Farrar. And it might be days before teams of detectives and arson investigators could identify the cause of the fire.

17

Y
oung though she was, Lissa held no more hope than her father about the fate of Tim and Kelly. While she was being treated by paramedics for smoke inhalation in the fire department ambulance, Mike and Lissa had a tragic conversation. “She looked at me,” Mike recalled, “and she said, ‘Dad, they’re dead, aren’t they?’ I had to tell her, ‘Yes, Lissa—I’m afraid they are.’”

Mike, Debora, and Lissa were transported to the Prairie Village Police Department in the early morning hours of October 24, 1995. Lissa waited in one room with Mike’s parents, twisting her hands nervously, her face stained with tears and smoke. Mike and Debora were taken to separate rooms.

Mike would wait by himself for several hours. It was a terrible time to be alone, but the detectives wanted to question Debora first. He tried not to think about Tim and Kelly. Maybe there would be good news, although any rational being who had gazed into that hell of fire that had been a house would have a hard time being optimistic.

Detective Gary Baker had arrived at the fire scene shortly after 2:30 A.M. He would report back to headquarters as soon as there was any definitive word. At about three, the firefighters signaled that they had found a body. Baker had called Rod Smith to tell him that, and then called back almost immediately to say that it was one of the dogs—a greyhound.

*  *  *

Debora, still barefoot and wearing a dark rose cotton nightgown with a white collar and cuffs and a whimsical pattern of white sheep, was taken to a basement office in the police department. Here she would be interviewed by Detective Sergeant Greg Burnetta and Detective Rod Smith. This interview, and, indeed, all the other interviews connected to the investigation would be videotaped so that every word, inflection, and emotion would be available for reevaluation. The video camera is a remarkably effective new tool available to forensic science.

Although the Prairie Village police have since moved to new headquarters, in October 1995 the department was housed in a rather outdated facility next door. The best room for talking with Debora had painted cement-block walls and a linoleum floor, all of the same bland, pale celery color. There was a folding table—the kind families buy for reunions—and some vinyl and metal folding chairs. The room was not soundproof; and occasionally far-off telephones and distant officers’ voices could be heard.

It was one minute after four A.M. on Tuesday morning, October 24, when Rod Smith started the tape rolling. He and Greg Burnetta knew virtually nothing about the cause of the fire that had struck Debora’s home. They had been wakened and summoned to headquarters to try to make some sense of an embryonic case.

Burnetta and Smith did know that reports from Canterbury Court were pessimistic about the chance that Debora’s son and younger daughter had survived. A number of fire companies had been called out to fight the blaze; this usually indicated that a residence was fully involved. So the two detectives were somewhat startled to find Debora talkative, even cheerful. Although there was a slight odor of alcohol about her, she did not seem intoxicated.

She was not an attractive woman. Stocky, with heavy, almost masculine shoulders, she appeared to be in her mid-forties, yet she perched in her chair with one leg tucked under her in an almost childlike posture. She shifted her position frequently; from time to time, she rubbed her feet and picked at her toes. She wasn’t crying, nor did she look as if she had been crying.

Burnetta and Smith sat at one end of the fake-wood conference table, while Debora sat on a long side and turned her head to the right toward them. Burnetta was dressed in a striped white dress shirt, tie, and trousers; Smith wore jeans, a sweatshirt that read “Kansas,” athletic shoes, and a baseball cap. Their roles quickly became apparent. It was Smith who made small talk with Debora, while Burnetta only occasionally asked questions, instead bending his head over a yellow legal pad and taking copious notes.

“What we’re going to talk about,” Smith said, “is the house fire at your house—”

“Which, by the way,” Debora interrupted, “is the fire out?”

The detectives told her, truthfully, that they had not been there yet.

“You’re not under arrest,” Smith said. “You’re free to leave anytime you want.”

Debora was affable, but she asked, “Who are you guys?”

Burnetta and Smith introduced themselves and explained their roles. She nodded agreeably. “I’m just curious,” she said, and laughed. “I didn’t know whether you were the police or the fire department.”

Debora’s voice was very nasal, as if she had a cold, but her affect was that of a woman completely comfortable in her environment, and she seemed anxious to talk. She gave long, convoluted answers to every question the detectives asked.

Asked if she was under the influence of alcohol or any drugs, Debora said firmly, “No. I had
a
drink earlier tonight. One. Maybe one and a half. Barely. I’m fuzzy on time tonight because I can’t remember what time I went to bed—but I’d say between nine-thirty and ten-thirty. I had about a drink and a half at dinnertime, and they were not strong to begin with. I drank about half of the second one and then just turned the light off and went to sleep.”

Later, Debora said she had gone to her room, the master bedroom on the south end of the main floor, where she read and perhaps dozed. She thought Tim had gone to bed at ten, but some noise had wakened her around eleven and she went out to the kitchen. He was there, getting something to eat. They had said good night and gone to their own rooms at opposite ends of the house.

“And that’s the last I saw of any of them,” Debora said. “I turned my lamp off somewhere around eleven-thirty…. I did have a conversation with my husband on the phone sometime during the evening. It must have been ten or ten-thirty. He called me and asked me, ‘What did you want?’ He said someone had paged him. I told him, ‘I did not page you, and to the best of my knowledge the kids are asleep. If you want, I’ll go up and check.’”

She had found no one awake, she said. Burnetta noted all the discrepancies in times.

Debora told Smith and Burnetta that she was taking Prozac—20 milligrams a day—and that the last dose she had taken was at ten on Monday morning, fourteen hours before the fire. She recalled that she had been wakened from a sound sleep by a blaring noise. She said she assumed that her house had both a burglar and a fire alarm. “The alarm signal that woke me was nothing I recognized, and when I went to the panel in my room and tried to shut it off, it didn’t do anything.”

Debora said she was used to the burglar alarm going off; it had done so several times recently because she had two big dogs that set off the motion detector. But this sound was entirely different. “I thought I’d heard every noise it knew how to make—but this was a new one.”

She had tried three or four times to shut the alarm off at the control panel with no success. “So I opened the door to the hall—and it was just filled with smoke. It scared me, so I found the key that’s always on my bookshelf.”

Debora explained that she had to unlock the deadbolt on her bedroom door from the inside in order to step out onto the deck along the back of the house. “I left that way. As I went around the corner to inform the neighbors to call 911, that’s when I heard Tim on the intercom by the pool deck—he used to be my thirteen-year-old.”

Debora spoke in a steady stream-of-consciousness style, and she was apparently unaware that she had just referred to Tim in the past tense. She hurriedly explained that Tim had lost so many keys that he was quite used to going in and out of his window by means of the second-floor roof. “He must have done that thirty times.”

Debora had heard his voice on the intercom, but hadn’t seen him. She didn’t explain why she had not looked up toward his voice, but only listened to the intercom box attached to the wall of their house, by the back deck. “He said, ‘Mom, what shall I do?’ I said, ‘Tim, wait where you are and I’m going to call 911 to come and save you,’ and he said, ‘Well, should I get one of the girls and try to come out?’ I said ‘No’—which, I’m sure, was the kiss of death.”

Her words were chilling, but her inflection was matter-of-fact, even chatty. Debora could not recall the last time she had talked to Tim. She mentioned often that she was still “fuzzy” on time. She did remember running to the Formans’ and asking them to call 911. “But I have a feeling someone else had called, because by the time they understood what I was saying, the trucks had started to arrive.”

Debora did not say why she had not simply dialed 911 from the phone in her own bedroom or whether she had even lifted the phone to see if there was a dial tone.

After Dr. Forman had left her at his side door to call for help, Debora remembered, she turned around and saw “my ten-year-old on the garage roof. Lissa’s afraid of heights,” she remarked. “She’s afraid of pretty much everything. I said, ‘Jump!’ and she said, ‘No, I can’t do it,’ and I said, “You
will!
Jump to me now.’ And she jumped—and I missed her totally. I’m sure she’ll never trust anybody. And she fell down right at my feet, but she was not hurt. But I’m sure that’s the only reason we have Lissa alive.”

When Rod Smith asked Debora to go over the afternoon and evening before the fire in as much detail as she could, Debora recalled the day virtually minute by minute. She had picked her children up from their Pembroke Hill schools at three P.M. on Monday. “They all go to Pembroke Hill,” she said, speaking so fast that it was hard to make out her words. “At least, the living ones do.”

Again Smith and Burnetta noted that Debora was referring to her children in the past tense. But she continued her recitation without pause. She said that after she got them home from separate schools in the Pembroke Hill system, she took Lissa to buy two pairs of shoes. “Then we went home, and I gave everyone small assignments of chores to get done, and they did them, and then they were watching
Saved by the Bell
or one of those shows until the point that Lissa and I had to leave.

“We had one of those typical nights. I had a psychiatrist’s appointment at five-forty-five, and Lissa, the ten-year-old, had a ballet class from six to seven-thirty, and Tim had a hockey game at seven-fifteen, which left Kelly at loose ends.”

Debora said she had left Tim and Kelly home alone, waiting for Mike, who was to pick them up at 6:40. He brought them home about nine, “give or take five or ten minutes. And they had their typical good home-cooked meal of Kentucky Fried Chicken. And [the girls] then went to bed. But Tim was up until about eleven. I talked to him for quite a while in the kitchen.”

They had discussed Tim’s hockey game, which had gone extremely well. Rod Smith asked if he was a goalie, and she shook her head. “He’s not a goalie—he played goalie for two or three years, though.”

Asked about the status of her marriage, Debora answered vaguely. “I’m not even sure anything’s been filed, but we are signing … in the process of divorce.” She said that her two older children were very angry with their father. “In fact,” she remarked, “later today—at one-thirty—I have an appointment with a counselor to talk about what to do with the kids, before they go in to see him.”

Debora said the counseling would be for her and her three children because her husband had never been a major part of their lives. She was concerned about Tim and Lissa, while Kelly seemed to be taking the divorce fairly well.

She told Smith and Burnetta that Mike was a cardiologist, and she listed her own varied medical specialties, saying that she had stopped practicing at the “suggestion—really the
coercion
—of my husband, who wanted me to stay home and be a mom. I even retired my license. A big deal in
my
life the last couple of weeks has been ‘What am
I
going to do? Now.’ Because my life is changing whether I like it or not. So what I’ve decided I want to do is I want to do a psych residency, which will be a whole new deal for me … to live life the way I want.”

Her words rushed on, faster than Greg Burnetta could possibly write them down. He did his best, but he was glad that the video camera was catching them, too. There was scarcely a second’s pause between one of Debora’s thoughts and the next, and yet she seemed entirely rational—except for her references to Tim and Kelly in both the past and the present tense.

One thing was patently clear: Debora harbored intense rage toward her estranged husband. She apparently found fault with almost everything he did. She recalled that the weekend just past had been chaotic because she had to pick up Tim from his father’s apartment when he called wanting to come home, and then return for Lissa at midnight because she had heard her paternal grandmother and other relatives talking about her mother. “She was very upset and very angry,” Debora said, “because she was hearing her father and her grandmother talking about what a slob her mother was and how she couldn’t keep the house clean and how Lissa had no social skills because
‘she’
[Debora] had no social skills.”

Debora told Smith and Burnetta that she had promised her children she would always come and get them if they found themselves, at their father’s apartment, in a situation that they just couldn’t handle. Then she elaborated on her appointment with the counselor. The therapy was intended only for her children and their feelings toward their father. “We always said it was just the three kids and me, and they really didn’t care if he was there, but they were tried of listening to his crap. So they’re angry.”